Israel gets first Ethiopian-born beauty queen

21-year-old model Yityish Aynaw, a former IDF officer, made aliyah some 10 years ago.

Iatayes "Titi" Aeinao, 21, from Netanyahu wins Miss Israel 2013.

Photo: photo from channel 2 marc israel sellem

Yityish Aynaw, a former Israeli army officer, has become the first Ethiopian-born Israeli to win the Miss Israel pageant.

A panel of judges awarded the title to Aynaw, a 21-year-old model who came to Israel about a decade ago, at the International Convention Center Haifa on Wednesday.

"It's important that a member of the Ethiopian community wins the competition for the first time," she was quoted by Israeli media as telling the judges in response to a question. "There are many different communities of many different colors in Israel, and it's important to show that to the world." Aynaw came to Israel with her family when she was 12. Acclimating to Israel was difficult at first, Aynaw said, but she picked up the language quickly with the help of a friend.

She has been working as a saleswoman at a clothing store since her army discharge.

During the competition, Aynaw cited the slain American civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. as one of her heroes.

"He fought for justice and equality, and that's one of the reasons I'm here: I want to show that my community has many beautiful qualities that aren't always represented in the media," she said.

Islamophobia must be recognized as a crime against humanity in the same fashion that Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism should be, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said yesterday.

Speaking at the “Fifth Alliance of Civilizations Forum” in Vienna’s Hofburg Palace, the prime minister underlined the rising trend of fascism across the Europe. “We are facing a world in which racist attacks have gained momentum, terrorism has claimed more lives, and religions and sects treat each other with less understanding,” Erdoğan said.

“Just like Zionism, anti-Semitism and fascism, it becomes unavoidable that Islamophobia must be regarded as a crime against humanity,” Erdoğan said.

"We remind secretary-general Ban Ki-moon that his predecessor Kofi Annan recognized that the UN’s 1975 Zionism-is-racism resolution was an expression of anti-Semitism, and he welcomed its repeal." [UN Watch said.]

UN Watch urged all members of the Alliance’s High Level Group, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, “to denounce remarks that fundamentally contradict the very purpose of a forum supposedly dedicated to mutual tolerance.”

“Erdogan’s misuse of this global podium to incite hatred, and his resort to Ahmandinejad-style pronouncements appealing to the lowest common denominator in the Muslim world, will only strengthen the belief that his government is hewing to a confrontational stance, and fundamentally unwilling to end its four-year-old feud with Israel.”

Erdogan is saying that Jewish national self-determination is a "crime against humanity," which is by any yardstick an anti-semitic statement.

Will NATO or the UN condemn this vile expression of hate given at a UN-sponsored conference?

Recent Turkish pressure on France and Germany regarding accession to the European Union heighten the need to question Turkey’s strategic intentions and political identity. Is Turkey a moderate, pro-Western democracy? Or is it run by Islamists embracing policies and regimes hostile to the West?

Turkey wants to be treated as a member of the West, calls itself “European,” and expects EU membership alongside its NATO credentials. But Turkey has dissented on key policy issues like Iran sanctions, antagonized the only Middle East country with Western values (Israel), and – until the Arab Spring ruined relations with Syria – courted many regimes dangerously opposed to the West.

The Syrian war has undermined Turkey’s “no-problems-with-neighbors” strategy and exposed its bluster. In August 2011, Turkey threatened military action against Syria but only if other nations joined it. In June 2012, Syria shot down a Turkish warplane over the Mediterranean. The Turkish response: consultations with NATO followed by much sound and fury. So when Israeli warplanes allegedly attacked Syrian military targets earlier this month, one would have expected Turkey to praise tiny Israel for taking risks to address a regional threat that the much bigger Turkey has found too daunting to confront alone. Instead, according to the Turkish daily Hurriyet, Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu urged Syria to attack Israel, suggested that Assad’s inaction was due to “a secret agreement” with Israel, and vowed that Turkey would not sit still in the face of an Israeli attack on any Muslim country. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.

Not to be outdone by his foreign minister, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the Israeli airstrike in Syria “state terrorism.” Does Erdogan call the countless Turkish airstrikes into Iraq “state terrorism?” What about airstrikes by the international force that Turkey would presumably join if the West ever mustered the courage to intervene in Syria? Any sane observer must wonder if Erdogan and Davutoglu know how absurdly inconsistent they sound or if they actually believe their own propagandist drivel.

A sober look at Turkey’s past and present reveals a darker side that the EU is trying to overlook – presumably for the economic benefits of Turkish EU membership and the hope that such membership will reform Turkey. The past: the Ottoman Turks slaughtered approximately 1-1.5 million people in the Armenian Genocide almost a century ago. Rather than apologize and make reparations à la Germany, Turkey has whitewashed history and used Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code prohibiting “insulting Turkishness” to silence those brave enough to speak out about the issue – like journalist Hrant Dink (who was assassinated in 2007 for doing just that).

Indeed, today’s Turkish democracy falls short of EU standards. According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey is the “the world’s leading jailer” of reporters. Dissidents are jailed under vague anti-terror laws, and human rights organizations have documented many other abuses (often relating to the Kurdish conflict), including extrajudicial killings, “disappearances,” torture, and restrictions on free speech.

Turkey’s war with the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) completely discredits Turkish denunciations of Israeli conduct towards Palestinian terrorist organizations. According to figures released by the Turkish military and reported in the Hurriet, from 1984 to 2008, the conflict has killed about 32,000 PKK members. That 24-year total dwarfs the number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s 65-year struggle with terrorism. Thus, when Erdogan debased the Davos World Economic Forum to score cheap populist points by excoriating President Shimon Peres for Israel’s 2009 war on the Gazan terrorists attacking Israeli civilians, he obviously forgot his own country’s record.

Erdogan’s constant condemnation of Israel’s presence in the West Bank would suggest that Turkey profoundly respects the territorial integrity of its neighbors. Yet Turkey has illegally occupied Cyprus since 1974 – an occupation recognized by no country, compelled by no significant security concerns, and, according to the European Commission of Human Rights, rife with human rights abuses.

Turkey has also tried to block Israeli participation in NATO exercises, even though NATO benefits substantially from IDF expertise (so much that NATO may have finally secured Israel’s 2013 participation in exchange for granting Turkey’s request for Patriot missile defense systems).

And Turkey recently resumed the trial in absentia of former Israeli military commanders for the 2010 events on the Mavi Marmara. If Turkey’s sailors boarded an Israeli ship carrying supplies for Kurds and violating a Turkish naval blockade, and the Israeli passengers lethally attacked those sailors, how would the Turks have reacted? Rather than acknowledge both sides of the story in that unfortunate incident, Turkey has used it to deepen its diplomatic rift with Israel.

The irony is that – until Erdogan’s premiership – Israel and Turkey were extremely close allies. That Erdogan ruined the relationship is hardly surprising: as mayor of Istanbul in June 1997, he said, “The Jews have begun to crush the Muslims of Palestine, in the name of Zionism… Today, the image of the Jews is no different from that of the Nazis.” Birikim, a Turkish socialist culture magazine, reportedthis quote by Erdogan, which no Western newspaper covered.

The unfortunate reality may be that Turkey can pivot back towards the West only after the Islamists currently running the country are replaced by more moderate secularists (like Turkey’s pre-Erdogan leaders). Until then, the EU should continue to ask about Turkey’s troubling past and present.

Noah Beck is the author ofThe Last Israelis, a naval thriller about the Iranian nuclear threat and current geopolitical issues in the Middle East.

Contrary to most press reports, the hard data in the study in fact showed substantial differences between Palestinian and Israeli state textbooks. 84% of the excerpts from Palestinian texts were found to present negative characterizations of the other, compared to 49% in Israeli state texts; the corresponding scores for “positive” characterizations were 1% and 11%. Similar scores were recorded for descriptions of the actions of the other. Negative images of Israelis were far higher in Palestinian texts than were negative images of Palestinians in Israeli texts. (For photos, 66% vs. 6%, for illustrations, 43% vs. 17%.)

But the most striking contrasts had to do with Palestinian delegitimization: ignoring the existence of the other. 97% of Palestinian maps omitted Israeli cities, sites or Jewish holy places or sites as compared to 12% of Israeli maps that did not list Muslim sites or holy places.

Tell me what a school system is teaching its children and I will tell you whether there will be peace or war in another five to 10 years.

Less than a month ago, there were numerous press reports on the results of a high level joint US-Israeli-Palestinian study, Victims of their Own Narratives. The impression conveyed in these reports was that the study’s findings presented a roughly symmetric assessment on the prevalence, intensity and severity of incitement in Palestinian and Israeli textbooks. This impression is wrong.

The project was carried out by a team headed by Professor Bruce Wexler, a psychiatrist form Yale, and professors Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University and Sami Adwan of Bethlehem University, funded by the US State Department, and overseen by the “Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land.” The Council includes Israel’s Chief Rabbinate and Muslim and Christian clergymen. I was one of some 20 members of the Scientific Advisory Panel. I and three other Israeli members of the Scientific Advisory Panel withheld our own endorsements of the final report.

As an epidemiologist in the business of prediction and prevention, I was and remain intrigued by the attempts to measure incitement, which leads to conflict, and its opposite, education for respect for life and dignity of the other. What was good about the study was that it established the principle and feasibility of monitoring. It made a sincere effort to define and measure what I call Word Pollution the way we measure Air Pollution. There was a study design, protocol, definitions of incitement, and a well-thought-out statistical sampling procedure.

In the West monitoring air pollution and its effects led to major reductions in both. Can the same happen if we monitor “word pollution” and its effects on attitudes and behaviors which lead to hate, hostility, conflict and violence? I have proposed a Region-Wide Surveillance Network in the entire Mideast, based on the precedent established by the study.

But the study had major limitations. It ignored the insights of several previous hands-on studies, some strong, some weak. It was narrowly confined to textual excerpts alone, and did not include homework assignments, guidebooks for teachers, and the larger educational environment of children. It therefore did not capture much of the explicitly horrendous incitement in the public square, summer camps, children’s TV programs, and print media. The study did not look at Hamas run schools.

Contrary to most press reports, the hard data in the study in fact showed substantial differences between Palestinian and Israeli state textbooks. 84% of the excerpts from Palestinian texts were found to present negative characterizations of the other, compared to 49% in Israeli state texts; the corresponding scores for “positive” characterizations were 1% and 11%. Similar scores were recorded for descriptions of the actions of the other. Negative images of Israelis were far higher in Palestinian texts than were negative images of

But the most striking contrasts had to do with Palestinian delegitimization: ignoring the existence of the other. 97% of Palestinian maps omitted Israeli cities, sites or Jewish holy places or sites as compared to 12% of Israeli maps that did not list Muslim sites or holy places.

The major errors of omission and commission serve to obfuscate some of the most important differences. These errors seem to be driven by an effort to arrive at a politically correct impression of symmetry, in keeping with modern ideas in conflict resolution which emphasizes minimizing differences and maximizing similarities, even at the expense of truth.

The advantage of this approach is that it looks forward. The problem with it is that it can result in sliding down the slippery slope to moral equivalence. Professor Bar-Tal, a recognized authority in conflict resolution, wrote that he himself took a “holistic” approach (an academic way of saying that the study was driven by a preconceived notion), which appears to have distorted the assessment of the facts in the source material concerning education for peace and incitement.

This distortion resulted in understating major and fundamental differences between Israeli and Palestinan texts and missing important targets for preventive intervention. In my opinion, there was a non-critical approach to the use of national narratives to tell stories, motifs, and themes which promote emulation of role models for terror, therefore undermining respect for life and human dignity of the other as universal values. “It’s my narrative, therefore it’s OK” may be politically correct but is it education for respect for life and human dignity?

At Bar-Tal’s initiative, the study used the term delegitimize to lump together statements which dehumanize, demonize, defame and delegitimize – a term which conventionally means denying or ignoring the existence of the other.

The definitions preclude capturing examples of the far more severe types of hate language and incitement. Using this term, the study could have defined down the dehumanizing and demonizing venom of Mein Kampf as mere delegitimization.

Dr Ruth Firer, for many years at Hebrew University’s Truman Center, who over the years has published research on textbook analysis, and Dr Arnon Gross, a member of the Scientific Panel are both world authorities on textbooks. Both said that the study failed to capture many nuances picked up by hands-on inspection of texts.

Firer wrote that rigid comparisons cannot be symmetric, as she sees Israeli-Palestinian relationship in terms of occupier-occupied, but that this relationship has to be guided by the principle that respect and the right to live take priority over all.

Gross noted that “highly demonizing pieces were not included, under the pretext that they were not explicit enough. Thus, a piece saying ‘Your enemies killed your children, split open your women’s bellies…’ was rejected because it did not mention Jews or Israelis and was actually written in the early 20th century.”

Firer, Gross and I noted that the study says nothing about Palestinian texts ignoring or misrepresenting the Holocaust. They do not address the role of the Grand Mufti, who lived in Hitler’s bunker in the latter years of the war and was an accomplice of Eichman. A proposed antidote would have been to use the first and only textbook in Arabic on the Holocaust, written by Professor Mohammed Dajani of Al Quds University, himself a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel.

Another problem with the study is that it scored historical facts which are painful truths as negative depictions of the other. For example, Israeli excerpts describing the horrors of the Munich massacre are defined as conveying a negative message.

According to Gross:

Whoever reads the quotations…taken from the schoolbooks easily finds that Israeli schoolbooks…include revealing texts of open advocacy of peaceful resolution of the conflict…and are totally devoid of calls for solving it violently. Alongside their treatment of the Palestinians as enemies, they provide texts that portray the individual Palestinian as an ordinary, sometimes noble, human being with whom friendly relations could develop.

The Palestinian quotations, on the other hand, show none of these traits. They … contain neither an explicit call for peace with Israel nor a vision of a peaceful future alongside it; they speak of a struggle for liberation without specifically restricting that struggle to the areas of the West Bank and Gaza alone; that struggle is enhanced by the use of the traditional Islamic values of Jihad, martyrdom and Ribat; they recognize as legitimate neither Israel’s existence, nor the presence of its Jewish citizens in the country, nor the presence of Jewish holy places there;

In short, the study mismeasured or missed much incitement.

So when President Obama comes here to listen, the message to him is that those extolling Wafa Idris from the Fatah Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and others who killed ensure intergenerational perpetration of conflict, hate, terror and war.

Perhaps the last word should be left to Ruth Firer, who herself has a long record of work in joint Israeli-Palestinian cooperation: “The power of one negative word is stronger than few positive words – therefore the statistics can’t ignore it.”

In short, because Incitement Kills there should be Zero Tolerance for Incitement.

"Detainees were tortured and otherwise ill-treated, particularly by Preventive Security and the General Intelligence Service in the West Bank, and by Internal Security in Gaza, all of which were able to abuse detainees with impunity."

Alleged methods included beatings, suspension by the wrists or ankles, and enforced standing or sitting in painful positions for long periods, according to the Independent Commission for Human Rights.

The commission recorded 1,000 complaints of arbitrary arrests in the West Bank and more than 700 in Gaza. It said many of the PA's arrests occurred when President Mahmoud Abbas visited the UN in September.

It is important to point out the grave terrorism offences of which Al-Issawi was convicted, including firing a gun at a civilian vehicle in October 2001, indiscriminately firing an AK47 assault rifle at civilian buses, and manufacturing and distributing pipe bombs used in attacks on Israeli civilians.

The recent study of Palestinian and Israeli textbooks, prepared under the auspices of the Jerusalem-based Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land and issued today, is already generating much controversy, particularly relating to a false equivalency in comparing how Israeli and Palestinian school books portray the other and themes related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

It is clear that however well-meaning the sponsors and researchers of the textbook study may have been, the lack of sufficient historical, social and geopolitical context distort the findings and render this study counterproductive.

Thereport, titled “Victims of our own Narratives?” and funded in part by a grant from the U.S. Department of State, presents a dangerous premise -- that both sides have problems in not accepting the other and, in order to enhance the chances for peace, both sides have to do more to change their textbooks.

When the Oslo Accords were signed, based on the concept of Palestinian acceptance of Israel and Israeli territorial concessions to the Palestinians, the challenge for Israel was how to establish ways to concretize the Palestinian commitment to peace.

On the Israeli side, its concessions were concrete and irreversible. Peace by the Palestinians seemed intangible and reversible.

This is where the concept was introduced about monitoring to ensure that the Palestinians no longer taught their young to hate Israel and to delegitimize the Jewish state. If this did not happen, then it was hard to take seriously Palestinian statements on peace.

It is in light of this historical context that the new study of Palestinian and Israeli textbooks, released on February 6, is so disturbing. No one suggests that Israel does not have to do more to appreciate the Palestinian narrative. But by bundling the two issues, the study diminishes, almost to the point of overlooking, the centrality of this issue to Israel. Just as territory and a Palestinian state are core issues for the Palestinians, how Palestinians speak and teach about Israel in the media and in schools is a core issue for Israel. This is so because from the Israeli side, the reason the conflict has raged on for so long is directly connected to the way Israel is thought of by Palestinians, young and old.

By linking the textbooks of both sides in an artificial investigation, distortions and misperceptions are inevitable.

To name a few:

· The revelation that textbooks in the Israeli state secular school system, by far Israel’s largest, are many times better than Palestinian textbooks gets lost in the effort to say there are problems on both sides;

· Too often what is described as negative in Israeli texts is really just the observation of reality, for example that Israeli texts described the Palestinians as simply wanting to destroy Israel between 1948 and 1967;

· The unwillingness to accept that when Palestinians texts reject or ignore Israel’s existence that that is not dehumanization.

This study fits into a pattern of so much international intervention regarding the conflict: it seeks to put Palestinians in a better light -- here by juxtaposing it with Israel where it should not be done-- and by doing so discourages the Palestinians from taking the necessary positive steps toward Israel to make peace a reality.

Health Ministry's intermediate report finds Jaradat was not poisoned or suffered physical violence; fractures and hemorrhages are result of resuscitation attempt; forensic institute still investigating cause of death.

Palestinians carry body of Arafat Jaradat during his funeral in the village of Se'eer, Feb 25, 2013Photo: Ammar Awad/Reuters

The intermediate autopsy report on Arafat Jaradat, the Palestinian inmate who was found dead in his Megiddo Prison cell last week, said there was "no evidence" of poisoning or any evidence of physical violence against the 30-year-old gas station employee.

The Health Ministry said that the examination was performed by senior L. Greenberg Forensic Institute pathologist Prof. Yehuda Hiss, while Prof. Arnon Afek, head of the ministry’s medical branch, Palestinian pathologist Dr. Sabar Alul and Prof. Iris Barshack, head of the pathology institute at Sheba Medical Center.

According to the report, the fractures in the ribs and hemorrhages on the skin were typical of the condition in people who undergo intensive resuscitation in an attempt to save their lives. The resuscitation was performed for 50 minutes by prison physicians and Magen David Adom paramedics.

The ministry concluded that the forensic institute will continue to conduct tests to identify the cause of Jaradat’s death.

In addition to the Health Ministry's investigation, the police were investigating the death and a judge has ordered an inquest, as is the case in all instances of prison deaths.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called for an international inquiry into Jaradat's death, saying Jaradat was "assassinated" andaccusing the Shin Bet of torturingthe Palestinian detainee during interrogation.

Israeli officials dismissed the Palestinian Authority's demand for an international inquiry as a “predictable” maneuver and part of a larger strategy to bring the international community into the conflict whenever possible.

On Monday, Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch said that Israel would be happy to have an international professional look at how it was investigating the incident. The officials also noted that UN Undersecretary- General for Political Affairs Jeffrey Feltman called for an “independent and transparent” investigation, but said nothing about an international inquiry.

woensdag 27 februari 2013

The Gaza Strip is swarming with radical Islamist groups whose goal is to destroy Israel and the US. Most of these groups emerged after the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the Hamas takeover of the coastal region two years later.

The Hamas government, which feels threatened by these groups, has failed to stop them from exporting terrorists to neighboring countries. The Egyptian authorities have also been unsuccessful in preventing Palestinian jihadis from entering Sinai, which has become a major base for Muslim terrorists.

Palestinians Exporting Terrorists to SyriaWhere Next?

The Palestinians who are heading to Syria have been told their next station will be Jordan, then Israel, where, with their friends in Jabhat al-Nusra, they hope to create an pan-Islamic state ruled by Sharia laws.

The Gaza Strip has begun exporting terrorists to other countries. If the terrorists are not stopped, they will start showing up in European capitals and probably cities in the United States.

In contrast to claims by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas leaderships to the effect that the Palestinians are not taking sides in the conflict, Palestinians are involved in the fighting in Syria.

The Palestinians who are heading to Syria have been told their ultimate mission is to liberate Palestine "from the river to the sea." Once they get rid of Assad, they are told, they will move to their next station -- Jordan. From there, their jihad will take them to Israel, where they and their friends in Jabhat al-Nusra [The Support Front] hope to create a pan-Islamic state ruled by Sharia laws.

According to Palestinian sources in the Gaza Strip, in the past few weeks alone, dozens of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip headed to Syria through Turkey to join various radical organizations engaged in the fighting against the army of Bashar al-Assad.

Many of these Palestinians have fallen in love with Jabhat al-Nusra, a group recently designated a terrorist organization by the US and, according to reports in the Arab media, believed to be responsible for some of the massacres against Syrian civilians.

The organization consists of hundreds, if not thousands, of Muslim fundamentalists from several Arab and Islamic countries. Its declared goal is to topple the Assad regime and create an Islamic state.

The Palestinian men who are heading to Syria belong to Salafi and other radical Islamist groups that have been operating in the Gaza Strip over the past few years. Some are also former Hamas members who broke away from the Islamist movement under the pretext that it was too 'moderate.'

Abu al-Ayna al-Ansari, the leader of one of the Salafi groups in the Gaza Strip, revealed that in recent weeks at least two Palestinians were killed in the fighting in Syria: Mohamed Kunaita, 32, and Nidal al-Eshi, 23.

More than 1,000 Palestinians, most of them from the Yarmouk refugee camp near Damascus, have been killed in the past few months during the fighting between the rebels and Assad's army.

The camp has been under daily attacks by the Syrian army ever since terrorists belonging to Jabhat al-Nusra and other Islamist groups found shelter among the Palestinian residents.

The Gaza Strip is swarming with radical Islamist groups whose goal is to destroy Israel and the US. Most of these groups emerged after the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005 and the Hamas takeover of the coastal region two years later.

The Hamas government, which feels threatened by these groups, has failed to stop them from exporting terrorists to neighboring countries. The Egyptian authorities have also been unsuccessful in preventing Palestinian jihadis from entering Sinai, which has become a major base for Muslim terrorists.

The cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, which was reached after Operations Pillars of Defense three months ago, has left members of various terror groups unemployed.

Now that the jihadis in the Gaza Strip have nothing to do, such as fire rockets at Israel, they have started searching for other places to carry out their terror attacks. They have found no better place than Syria to start sending their men to join some of the radical Islamist organizations fighting against Bashar al-Assad's regime.

The US and Western countries would do well to pay serious attention; Syria is not where this trend will stop.

Yet, neither the jailing and intimidation of journalists (and other human rights abuses), nor the lack of democratic representation in their political leadership, has mobilized Palestinians in a significant way. At best, rallies are occasionally organized under the vague banner of "Palestinian unity."

Instead, Palestinians  and Arab citizens of Israel  are rallying under a different banner: the rights of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. Palestinians and Israel's Arabs, threatening a third intifada, have been demonstrating against the "injustice" of Israel's rearrest of terrorists who are among the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners released in October 2011 under the Egypt-brokered deal between Hamas and Israel for the return of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit.

Palestinians have ignored the fates of journalists arrested, beaten, censored and arrested by their own political leadership.

Many injustices plague Palestinian society, few of which can be blamed on the Jewish state, even by the farthest stretches of the imaginations of Israel's enemies. These are self-inflicted injustices.

In the Gaza Strip, an Islamic quasi-state ruled by the totalitarian regime of Hamas has in the past few weeks arrested or summoned for interrogation at least 16 journalists as part of a campaign aimed at intimidating the local media, as reported by The Jerusalem Post's Khaled Abu Toameh.

These journalists' only crime is daring to criticize Hamas's leadership.

And the situation for journalists in the West Bank, which is ruled by the "moderate" Palestinian Authority, is not much better. Just last week, a PA court sentenced 26- year-old Anas Said Awwad to one year in prison for "insulting" President Mahmoud Abbas on Facebook.

Awwad was found guilty of depicting Abbas as a member of the Real Madrid soccer team.

In both Gaza and the West Bank the Palestinian political leadership has suffered from a fundamental lack of legitimacy for the past four years. Besides municipal votes, the last democratic election in Gaza and the West Bank took place in 2006. Palestinians were supposed to hold elections again in 2009. But after Hamas's victory in the last election, Palestinian leadership was split.

With Western support, the Fatah-led PLO managed to maintain control over the West Bank. In Gaza, Hamas launched a violent and successful putsch in which Fatah members were shot down in the streets or thrown off buildings. Warnings by Israel that if Hamas were allowed to participate, Palestinians' first truly democratic election (Hamas boycotted the 1996 vote) would be their last were not heeded by then-US president George Bush.

Yet, neither the jailing and intimidation of journalists (and other human rights abuses), nor the lack of democratic representation in their political leadership, has mobilized Palestinians in a significant way. At best, rallies are occasionally organized under the vague banner of "Palestinian unity."

Instead, Palestinians  and Arab citizens of Israel  are rallying under a different banner: the rights of Palestinian terrorists in Israeli jails. Palestinians and Israel's Arabs, threatening a third intifada, have been demonstrating against the "injustice" of Israel's rearrest of terrorists who are among the 1,027 Palestinian prisoners released in October 2011 under the Egypt-brokered deal between Hamas and Israel for the return of IDF soldier Gilad Schalit.

Samer Tariq Ahmad Essawi, a member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is one of the rearrested terrorists. Essawi was captured in April 2002 and later sentenced to 30 years for possessing weapons and for helping to form terrorist cells in the Jerusalem area. He was one of many terrorists arrested during Defensive Shield, the military operation carried out under thenprime minister Ariel Sharon that essentially ended the second intifada and restored security to Israelis who had been regular victims of suicide bombings and shootings.

Another rearrested prisoner is Ayman Sharawna, who was arrested for helping carry out a terrorist attack in Beersheba. On the morning of May 11, 2002, two Palestinian terrorists placed an improvised bomb near a group of civilians in the Old City of Beersheba and fled. A technical fault prevented the bomb from exploding fully.

Eighteen civilians were wounded. Sharawna was sentenced to 38 years imprisonment.

Both men were released in the Schalit deal and both men subsequently violated the conditions of their release.

Sharawna returned to terrorist activities with Hamas, according to the IDF, and was arrested in January 2012.

Essawi, who was freed on condition he remain inside Jerusalem, left the city to visit the nearby PA town of a-Ram and was arrested in July 2012. Both men must now finish out their original sentences.

Inexplicably, Palestinians  and Israel's Arab citizens  have chosen to champion the causes of these hunger-striking terrorists and others while ignoring the fates of journalists arrested, beaten, censored and arrested by their own political leadership, which for four years now has been ruling without democratic legitimacy. Under the circumstances, what prospects for peace can US President Barack Obama hope for when he visits the region next month?